Manufacturing of portion packets of a smokeless product for oral use, such as pouches filled with tobacco snuff or non-tobacco snuff, generally involve the steps of (pre)treating and processing of the raw material (e.g. grounding, adding salt and water, pasteurizing, mixing with additives, moistening, etc.), forming portion-sized packets of the bulk material, wrapping a packaging material, such as a standard cellulose based non-woven fabric for snus, around the portion packets, and placing individual portion packets in a box or container.
Examples of devices used in such manufacturing are disclosed in e.g. WO 2009/025604, EP 138649, EP 149985, WO 2009/047627 and SE 506146.
The step of placing the portion packets in a container has not been paid much attention to in the past. Principally, a certain number of portion packets have simply been allowed to fall down in the container.
However, lately it has been paid some attention to the fact that portion packets positioned in a certain pattern in the container provides a more attractive appearance to the user. It has also been proposed that, by being able of positioning the portion packets in the container, the portion packets might be packed into the container in a more efficient way, both with regard to time (production speed) and space (geometrically efficient packing).
How to achieve efficient positioning/packing of portion packets in large-scale production is, however, not obvious because tobacco snuff or non-tobacco snuff portion pack products are relatively difficult to handle in automated processes (since they usually are soft and somewhat sticky) and because the production rate is very high (typically several hundreds of portion packets per minute).